i wonder if anyone would care to share tips on organizing home dv video
process.

- how do you label your tapes?

- do you reuse tapes? if yes, how do you relabel them? meaning, do you
simply write in pensil and then erase/write over, or is there another
more clever way of doing it? do you perhaps pre-label, like keep your
tapes numbered? if so, what does that do to tape reuse?

- what do you do for long term storage of archived tapes? racks?
albums?

- when shooting, do you keep any kind of log? if so, how? do you keep a
notebook with you, or make notes directly on tape's jacket or some
such?

- what equipment do you carry with you? tripod? light? mics? what kind
of bag do you use for it?

- do you somehow tag captured tapes?

and whatever else you may be willing to share, any practical tips for
home videographers.

just to reiterate, this is for casual amateur, not for a professional.

thanks in advance!

Not sure what you're asking.  I shoot travel video.  The label includes the
country, date, and tape sequence number.


Never.  Tape is cheap, the video on them irreplaceable.  Reusing tapes
increases the risk of dropouts, and I like keeping the raw video around for
re-edits.

I have a cabinet in which they are stacked vertically like books.  It's cool
and dry.

I don't bother with a log for video.  I will, occassionally, log specifics
on the disk when I use an MD for separate sound.

I use a LowePro MiniTrekker  backpack.  Everything below fits just fine,
with room to spare, and is well within the "personal item, e.g. camera bag"
limits for carryon on airlines.  When I travel, I take:

Sony VX2000 camcorder
Optex WA lens
Bogen/Manfrotto 3444D carbon fiber tripod with fluid video head
Adorama monopod with mini head.
Mini-tripod (table top)
3 batteries for the camcorder
Charger
Lots of tapes
EwaMarine rain cape
Stereo lapel mike with wind screen
Sony handheld stereo mike with wind screen
Shotgun mike with wind screen
Wind screen for the VX2000 on-camera mike
Polarizing filter
Microfiber cloth
Sony 10 watt/20 watt dual light (works with camcorder batteries, so can be
used off camera -- on camera lighting is usually flat and uneven)
Clamp with screw for mounting cameras on irregular surfaces
Thin rubber drain cover (great for removing stuck filters)
Panasonic MD recorder
Canon 10D still camera
WA, tele and normal lens for Canon
Polarizing and UV filters
2 batteries for Canon and charger
2 CF cards for Canon
Rubber bulb blower for cleaning sensor on Canon
Angle bracket to use the Canon on the Bogen tripod

Of course, once I get where I'm going, I only take out that which I need to
shoot on a given day.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.  After I do my edits, I store an AVI
master to tape.  The label says "Master" and I also use a highlighter to
color it yellow -- it helps the master tapes stand out from the raw video.

It all depends on what you're doing.  I'm an amateur, but I'm interested in
video and care about the quality of what I produce. This is reflected in my
selection of equipment, and how much I'm willing to lug with me when I
travel.  I've also got a pretty decent video editing computer and a
considerable amount prosumer software. I spend a fair amount of time editing
the results and wind up with DVDs that my wife and I watch over and over,
and truly function as souvenirs of our travels -- "souvenir" is French for
"to remember."

If you're just shooting birthday videos of the kids, you probably don't need
1/20th of what I've got.

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congrats on a great camera!

i have canon optura pi, which is decent, but soon there may be a need
to upgrade. actually i expect to talk my wife into getting a second
camera, which should provide for a much more interesting, 2-point
shooting.

also i like that you have a healthy size camera backpack. fits all the
essential accessories. keeps them in one place, too, so even on the
road i can clean lense and do some maintenance during downtimes. great
tip, thank you!

thats exactly what i was asking, thank you.

so basically you label tape with venue info, date/time. sequence number
is interesting, do you number all your tapes in advance maybe? you
mentioned that you carry ample supply of blank tapes, it would probably
make sense that you pre-number them, yes? or am i missing the whole
point of this numbering business? (sorry, probably a dumb question,
just want to be sure i understand).

makes sense, and i am very inclined to do the same. so thanks for
confirming this for me.

do you use inside that cabinet dv-tape racks of some sort? how many
tapes do you have if you dont mind my asking?

thats the level i've been at so far, but i think i'm outgrowning that
phase and am interested in stepping up a bit. so thanks for all your
valuable advice.

and yes, i agree, DVDs are best souvenirs, the french know what they're
talking about ;)

Good luck getting your wife to agree. ;)  Mine won't go near the equipment,
and gives me a hard time up until she sees each final DVD.  I got the VX2000
primarily because I wasn't satisifed with the low-light performance of
anything else on the market.  My next camera will probably be HDV, but I
want to wait for another generation of cameras to come up.


That's my "fly to where we're going" kit.  When we go out, I only carry the
bare minimum for what I want to shoot.  All that weight gets old pretty
quick.  However, I will never check any valuables when I fly, so everything
has to be carried on.  It's also amazing the number of things that can go
wrong on the road.  I started carrying the bulb blower when my 10D developed
an annoying spot on the sensor.  I couldn't do anything about it until I
returned home (try buying a blower bulb in India ;) ) and wound up having to
fix each and every still that I took in Photoshop.

I don't.  First, I don't know how much I'll shoot in a day (though I average
30 minutes per day of video when I'm travelling).  I've also encountered 1
or tapes (out of hundreds) that had problems and had to be chucked.


you
It doesn't take long for me to label the tapes at the end of each day, and
it's become part of the travel ritual, along with putting the batteries in
the charger, transferring the digital stills to the computer and
re-formatting the CF cards, etc.

I use Sony Excellence, which runs about $7/tape in quantity.  There are
cheaper grades, but it just doesn't make sense to me.  I've invested many
thousands of dollars in my equipment, and then many additional thousands to
get myself to where I'm going.  I don't see any reason to jeopardize the
video I shoot just to save a buck or two on the tape.

In our current house, we have a den/home-theater-sort-of downstairs in the
basement, where it is normally cool and dry.  I have a large cabinet that
holds our DVDs, CDs, and video tapes.  I probably have a few hundred miniDV
tapes stored in there, another hundred or two Hi8 tapes (which I shot before
getting my first miniDV camcorder), as well as some VHS and beta that go
back to the 80s.

Video is an addictive hobby, and you'll be surprised how quickly the bills
and the time commitment mount up when you start upgrading.  If you're
interested, I have a couple of short clips here:

www.travelersvideo.com

They're not really representative of the travel videos I do for my wife and
my inlaws, but are along the lines of generic "video tone poems."
Incidently, a lot of the Las Vegas one was intentionally shot "shaky," but
you'll get a good idea of the difference between shooting with a handheld
camera (with very good optical image stablization) and a camera on a tripod
(which was used to shoot the other clips).  I've found that the biggest
factor which distinguishes amateur video from professional-looking video
(aside from overuse of special effects and zooming) is the steadiness of the
shot.

Show quoteHide quote

i'm lucky on this front. while my wife too wont (voluntarily anyways)
touch the equipment, she is the one actively pushing this. whenever we
go somewhere, she wont leave the house without making me take camera
and/or still camera with us.

and of course i couldnt have asked for a better excuse to buy more
gadgets ;)

another great point, i'm going to this think about this. although
vx2000 is a pretty serious investment, i have to say i'm too very
dissatisfied with low light performance of my camera. which
realistically is a mode i have to shoot in frequently.

regarding labeling, so you just write on tape's back year/venue/# and
then on jacket some notes? do you write in pencil? or it doesnt really
matter because you never have to erase?

also, you mentioned that you keep master tapes. does it mean that after
you edit on your computer you also dump master on a tape for archiving
purposes? or am i missing something?

btw, i looked at (so far) one of your videos, the venice at night, and
i liked it alot. very nice and appropriate choice of music. and i like
how you picked your shots, zoom-ins and zoom-outs.

do you plan what and how you shoot in advance? do you sort of walk
around, scout the place and then revisit to shoot? this probably comes
with experience, and is a creative process (e.g. no rules) but i wonder
if there's a routine or some kind of tricks you've worked out for
yourself for filming while traveling?

i plan to watch your other videos later tonight.

once again, thanks alot for all your tips, this is very helpful.

I really wanted something smaller and lighter than the VX2000, but there was
simply nothing on the market that compared for low-light shooting.  If I had
decided to move up from a TRV-20 earlier, I would have gotten the TRV-900,
which was a decent 3-ccd machine with good low-light characteristics.
Unfortunately, Sony had discontinued it before I decided to get a new
machine and its replacement, the TRV-950, was a dismal machine -- poor
low-light, lots of stupid gimmicks.


No notes on the jacket, only the location, date and tape sequence number on
the label.  I'll use ink if a pen is handy.  I don't worry about re-labeling
the tapes, as I never have need to do so.

Nope, you've got it on the nose.  Editing of each project can take from a
couple of weeks to a month or more.  Once it's done, I'll dump the edited
project back to a fresh tape and keep that as the edited master.  I use DVDs
only as delivery media for a project, never for storage.

Thanks very much.  The music is a SonicFire Pro Quicktracks selection.  I
use them for the stuff on the website because it comes with a license, i.e.
I'm not infringing anyone's copyright by using it.  The SonicFire Pro stuff
is pretty nice, and has the advantage of dynamically re-sizing the musical
selection to fit whatever time you want.

The "At Night" clips aren't planned, other than I am already familiar with
the different cities before I do the shoot.  These came about when my wife
would say, "I'm tired and want to go to bed early so we'll be ready for
[whatever it is we're doing the next day]."  I reply, "Fine, I'll go out and
shoot some video."   As I said, though, they're not really typical of the
travel videos I shoot, but are more of an extra "lagniape."

My interest in travel videography started when I got my first camcorder, a
Hi8 TR-600, originally purchased for my wedding.  Before that, I had fooled
around with my father's old spring-wound (!) 8mm movie camera as a kid, and
had once gone on a trip with a girl-friend in the 80s and used her
incredibly heavy and awkward Panasonic "portable" video system (a heavy
camera with a cable to a heavier VCR that you carried around with a shoulder
strap).  That discouraged me from video, and I only took still cameras when
I traveled.  After I got married,  I took the TR600 on a trip and shot a lot
of stuff just walking around with the camera held at shoulder level.  My
wife and I were both surprised at how vividly these shots recalled the
ambience of the environment -- playing back the tapes put us right back at
the location at which they were shot.  Everything mushroomed from there.

The videos I shoot now are, essentially, travelogues starring my wife.  I do
think in terms of story arc, and make sure that each sequence has a
beginning, middle and end, even if it's something as simple as an
establishing shot of my wife entering a location and a final shot showing
her leaving.  I make a point of shooting "b-roll," i.e. shots that I can
intercut with the master shot to help with continuity.   This is
particularly helpful when I shoot itinerant musicians -- the idea is to make
it appear like a multiple camera shoot and the b-roll (sometimes I'll use
zoom-and-panned stills) covers the camera moves.  My wife and I are art
museum fanatics, and I've developed editing techniques, setting what I shoot
in the museum to music, that keeps it interesting and flowing, and not
looking like a slide show.  I've carried an MD recorder for a while, now,
but recently started putting it in my wife's pocket and clipping a lapel
mike to her.  She forgets it's there, and I get good candid responses from
her without having to say, "wait, say that again for the camera."

Hey, video's not my hobby -- it's my obsession! ;)

Show quoteHide quote

z wrote:

I justed started a personal project of "finally" getting all my personal
video to DVD, and backed up via DVCAM.


I label all my tapes with a RealID number right when I open them.  I
keep a sharpie with me.

I label them like this.. Say today was the very first bit of video that
I shot on that tape.  I would write 'ReadID: 20060519'

2006 - The year, 05 -month of may, and 19th being the date today.  This
way, you can easily categorize your tapes by the real IDs grouped by
year.  And, no two videos tapes have the same RealID, unless of course I
shot two tapes for the day, but this doesn't usually happen with
personal video.  A little here, and littler there.



No way.. too cheap, just store it, buy another.



A good storage spot.



In personal video, no.  I prefer to "be surprised" while watching the
video footage again.  I take some notes on capturing while watching, but
mostly I just get it all into the editing, then I'll make logs.


I have lights and a full sound package, but I don't use it for personal
video.


Lock the tap, so you can't re-use the tape.  I throw it into my cabinet,
and figure out where it came from later when I get it digitized.  The
time code tells me the date, and I've always remembered where the place was.


For my personal video.. I'm using Digital8, but you can fully expect
that any format will never last.  If you loose, or your camera dies, you
wont be able to play back the footage..

So,  Be sure to get that footage onto an editor, and edit it and onto a
DVD, then do a back up dupe onto yet another format (DVCAM), so that
you'll have something else too fall back on.

People are talking about hard drive backups now, but I still find Tape
(miniDV, DVCAM, HDV) the most economical method of holding hundreds of
hours of videos.  Yeah, sooner or later tape will disappear, but I dont
think in the next 20 years or so.. then you can worry at that time which
new format to move it too. :)

-bill

Sing it, brother!


One note of caution to the unwary (or, in my case, the excessively thick):

I once had reason to reset my VX2000.  I don't now recall why -- it may have
been because the internal battery needed to be changed, or it may have been
some other reason.  In any event, I wound with a camera that didn't have the
internal clock set.  I shot 4 or 5 tapes before I noticed the problem.  The
result was video with no date and time stamps.  This, at least to me, was
non-intuitive -- I thought I would get inaccurate date and time stamps, i.e.
starting at midnight on 1/1/80 or some such, but instead I got nothing.
This made capture extremely difficult -- all of my software capture options
required date and time stamps in order to split the capture up into clips.
I wound up using Scenealyzer Live's optical scene detection, which isn't
bad, but also isn't 100%, so I had to manually log a lot of video.  What a
pain! And I should have known better.


And video, as with audio, once digitized is easily moved between formats.

Show quoteHide quote

z wrote:

Since others have answered most questions, I'll only rell you what I do
here. I sometimes keep a log while shooting. but always log in more
detail later. I have been a Video hobbyist for close to 20
years.starting with VHS, then S-VHS, then Hi-8 and nov DV. I still have
most of the original tapes and every tape has been logged into a Dara
Base. Tapes are numbered, the first couple of data fields are general
information and then other fields have a detailed log of content. So, I
have an ever expanding stock foorage libtary. If I need a shot of the
Eifle tower, enter it in the data base and it will probably come back
with one of my hi-8 tapes, If I need a groundhog it may well even be on
a VHS.

Dave

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